Social From The Start

Feb 9, 2010

Twitter, identi.ca and Facebook have become an increasingly common medium in which people are communicating. While Google Wave vies to be the next generation of communication (as we waxed lyrical about on the recent Shot Of Jaq), in reality email and microblogging are unlikely to be unseated as primary methods of communication. Naturally, we want to make these methods of connecting people rock good and hard in Ubuntu.

Today Ken VanDine uploaded a new Gwibber to Lucid which adds improved reliability, multi-column views, a new theme and more. It looks like this:

I love you Ryan Paul. I cried 140 individual tears of joy.

This leads me to a simple conclusion:

Goodbye Tweetdeck. You suck considerably more than Gwibber.

No more ugly Adobe Air app. No more closed source Twitter client. No more lack of identi.ca support. No more horrible notification bubbles. Instead, sweet, native, effortless microblogging, right from my Ubuntu desktop. A veritable ass kicking at at it’s finest.

Now, this is cool in of itself, but then combine it with the ability to tweet/dent right from the Me menu:

Microblogging built in, sleek and elegant. I am stoked, and Gwibber is rocking the house. Also, if you are the opportunistically development minded, don’t forget that you can build microblogging support into your apps with Gwibber’s API too, and there will be a session on how to do this at Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer Week.

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I do feel kinda bad for (huge number of) people who don’t do microblogging. That text box in the Me menu should really be complementing your instant messaging status, not broadcasting to Twitter.

And I think the Me menu applet needs to be connected with the messaging menu applet, to help those many users who don’t want such bother and now must kill off the session control applet to remove the microblog stuff. It strikes me that this design is ignoring a very significant group of users who really couldn’t care less about social networking.

Even though I don’t use microblogging sites, I think that looks really cool. I have one question: now that Ubuntu is leading the way with these really cool UI innovations with the top panel, what will happen when Gnome 3.0 hits? I have been following Gnomeshell development from the start, and my understanding is that they have designed the shell so it would not be customizable by downstream distributions. Will Ubuntu use the Gnomeshell, and toss away all of the work it has done with notifications and the system tray, or use the messaging system from Gnomeshell? Also, what are your thoughts in general about the Gnomeshell? Thanks, this question has bugging me more and more as I see Ubuntu and Gnome divergingin fundamental designs.

Gwibber definitely rocks, but if you want to help, push for normal proxy support in Gwibber. So far Twitter doesn’t work when behind web proxy. It would be sad that this wouldn’t be fixed before Lucid.

The problem is that that is the only non-microblogging social network it works with. Gwibber and Ubuntu will help perpetuate the semi-monopoly enjoyed by Facebook and Twitter if this is not changed in time for Lucid.

Very cool job Ryan! It was great to take part in discussions at UDS, then see this come to fruition. Not sure whether Zoopster has seen this as I know this will be right up his alley! Will have to get caught back up on Shot of Jaq!!